I was still waking up when I first rechosted this, so I wasn't feeling coherent enough to write anything in response, but I wanted to chime in and say that Liz's breakdown in this post is essentially my own exact hierarchy I follow when I have to convey information within tight spatial constraints in localizations. A lot of this stuff becomes self-evident the longer you work in this industry, but it's still vindicating to see that a methodology that I basically just self-taught myself through practical experience was being practiced way before my time under even tighter constraints.
In recent years, I've probably had to put this sort of stuff most in to practice when I was writing the tutorials for Tales of Arise, the majority of which I personally handled myself. Unlike actual character dialogue, which generally arrived to us in a pretty finalized form, presumably due to recording considerations on the Japanese side, the tutorials were actually iterated on pretty heavily throughout the course of localization. Some messages I touched and retouched four or five times throughout the entire process. The changes made to the Japanese text were always sensible and ultimately made things clearer in that language, but they also tended to result in each tutorial being wordier. They still fit within the Japanese text length limits, but if the additional content was essentially bolted onto my existing English translations, they often ran the risk of going over that limit, which remained unchanged, probably due to various technical and logistical reasons that can make tweaking such things precarious after the fact once the UI has been finalized.
Anyway, the point being is that with those sorts of revisions, I would essentially have to carefully reanalyze the content of the Japanese text and break down each part of it into different levels of translation priority like what's outlined in Liz's post. In practice, this meant that each tutorial had three overarching objectives that I ideally tried to accomplish depending within the space allotted to me and other circumstantial considerations, which I'd list in order of most to least important as:
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Conveying critical information. This one is obvious enough. If I don't maintain parity with the Japanese in terms of essential facts, foreign players are going to have less of an understanding of the system in question than the development team intended, at least without trial and error. Even if the resulting text ain't pretty, if I have to cover a lot of ground within a tight space, I have to do what it takes to get to as close as 100 percent parity as possible.
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Relating the information to other systems in the game. Sometimes the Japanese descriptions would elaborate on how a given system works in tandem with other parts of the game, but a lot of the time, if I had the room to spare, I would go in and expand the English tutorial text in minor ways to emphasize those interconnections. Basically, in a well-made game, no one system is an island and in an ideal situation, the tutorial text should always strive reinforce player's existing knowledge to both help them better internalize those basics, as well as better grasp their place within the wider systemic ecosystem that the game offers. With Tales of Arise, this happened a lot with the combat tutorials, which would generally be about specific actions. But, when I felt it was appropriate and wouldn't overwhelm players with too much information, I would also pepper in reminders about related systems so that players would be cognizant of what else is going on in the game when something takes place and therefore more aware of the tools they have at their disposal beyond what the game is immediately talking about.
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Expanding on assumptions taken for granted by Japanese players/developers, but aren't a given overseas. Even as more Japanese games than ever are being localized, there remain vast disparities between Japanese and foreign audiences when it comes to player literacy with regard to certain types of mechanics and systems, especially if a game is taking inspiration from a part of Japanese game history that either wasn't localized before or only has a niche audience when localized. What developers can take for granted in terms of baseline knowledge in one market isn't always true in other markets, so on occasion, when I felt it was necessary and I had the space to spare, I also went in and filled in some of those implicit blanks with my English tutorials so that foreign players could be sufficiently brought up to speed. Frankly speaking, I think one of the big reasons why a lot of niche, but otherwise domestically popular games fail to take off overseas is that their translated tutorials don't take this disparity into consideration and only offer a 1:1 translation, forcing non-Japanese players to puzzle out the aspects that are accepted as givens in their native contexts. Even if Arise is still an action RPG at its core, it's a game that's doing a lot of things noticeably different from the rest of the series, which meant it was important that my tutorials take into consideration not just players who are new to Tales, but also existing fans who may not be as familiar with those new aspects that come from other games or even other types of games altogether.
How well I was able to accomplish points 2 and 3 varied heavily between tutorial messages, but all told, it was definitely a game that made me hone that particular part of my craft and my subsequent work has definitely been made better from that experience. Some tutorial messages required a little (and sometimes repeated) hair-pulling to achieve even just that first point, but overall, I came away from it really satisfied with how much information I was able to include without sacrificing too much in the way of smooth readability. It's not as glamorous as writing character dialogue, which frustratingly still gets the lion's share of attention when it comes to aspects people are quick to praise, but there's a certain artisanal satisfaction to successfully puzzling out these sorts of things and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't one of the reasons why this job remains engaging to me even eight years on. π